CMS Independence at Home Demonstration – Comments due December 31
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is working on a new demonstration project, the Independence at Home Demonstration. This demonstration was mandated by the Affordable Care Act to test a payment incentive and service delivery model that uses physician and nurse practitioner directed home-based primary care teams designed to reduce expenditures and improve health outcomes in the provision of items and services to applicable beneficiaries.
AOTA participated in a CMS call, during which CMS asked for comments from stakeholders. CMS is especially interested in information and feedback in the following topic areas:
a. How do physicians and nurse practitioners with practices solely providing care in the home obtain referrals?
b. Do the practices have relationships with hospitals and emergency rooms and if admitted to the hospital who follows the patient and who is the physician of record? Do primary care/admitting physicians/hospitalists refer patients to home care physician practices?
c. What level of integration do home care physician practices have with electronic health records, remote monitoring, and mobile diagnostic technology?
d. What are home care physician groups measuring to track their own performance? What quality metrics are meaningful for this very vulnerable population?
AOTA will submit comments. We also encourage interested members to submit comments—especially if you have expertise in the home health setting. Comments are due by December 31, 2010, and may be submitted to CMS by e-mail at IndependenceAtHomeDemo@cms.hhs.gov. More information about the demonstration is available on the CMS Web site.
